Spend the raise on selling

Some of our earliest clients were founders we met at angel investor pitch events. Each had a good idea, a handful of real customer conversations, and a slide asking for money to build the product.

That slide was the problem. The room was being asked to fund a year or more of engineering before the first sale, and every angel present had watched that go wrong before: the build takes longer than planned, the market moves, and the money runs out around the time the product is ready to sell.

What has changed

The first working version of a product now costs a small fraction of what it did. Rapid development and prototyping, with experienced engineers directing AI, get a real product in front of real customers in weeks. The build has moved from being the largest line on the plan to one of the smaller ones.

That changes what a raise is for. If the product costs a modest, fixed amount and arrives in a couple of months, investor money can go on the things that produce revenue: getting in front of customers, hiring the first salesperson, running the pilots, closing the first contracts. Investors want to fund those, because they make the company worth more.

What happened to those founders

We built their first products quickly and at a low price. They went back to investors with working software, early customers using it, and an ask framed around going to market. The investment that had stalled came through.

The product had not changed much from the slide. What had changed was the risk the investors were being asked to carry. Funding a sales push for a product that already exists is a different proposition from funding the hope that a product will exist.

What to ask for

If you are preparing a pitch and engineering is the largest line, look at it again.

Get the first version built for a fixed price on a fixed date. Make it a real product, on foundations you can raise against, and small enough to ship. Then raise for time in front of customers, which is the part only money can buy.

Investors will still ask how the product gets built and who will look after it. The answer is a small senior team that has done it before and stays on afterwards, at a monthly cost you can plan around. That is a far easier answer than a headcount plan and a hiring timeline.

If the biggest number on your slide is the build, talk to us before you present it.